4. Research Questions

Designing a new study can seem daunting, especially after you’ve read studies by professional sociologists. With all the factors to consider, and all the things that can go wrong, how can you put together a feasible and potentially useful study? It’s important to remember that the design of a study evolves over time, and you typically won’t get it right in the first draft. Doing research is a marathon, not a sprint, and you want to focus on each step, one at a time, knowing that so long as you’re making incremental progress, you’ll eventually reach your destination. We also want to emphasize how the planning process for a scientific study—what we call research design—tends to be long and involved. Social scientists are expected to do a lot of background reading and thinking about their research before they start collecting or analyzing data to any substantial degree. Unlike journalists, social scientists don’t usually work on tight daily deadlines, and they take the time to make sure their work truly builds on existing knowledge.

You will start the research design process by developing an interesting research question, the question you are trying to answer by collecting and analyzing data for your study. This chapter will focus on strategies for how to go about generating a good research question. However, we want to start off by giving you a roadmap for the design of your study and showing you how your research question matters in the planning you’ll be doing. Indeed, your initial choice of a research question will shape all other aspects of your proposed study. And as you revise that question, your plans for your data collection and analysis will undoubtedly change, too. That’s normal for research design, and one of the reasons why the design process takes so long: you want to be confident that all the time and energy you put into a project will ultimately pay off.

Here is an outline of what the stages in research design might look like. We have also included in parentheses the chapters in the textbook that will discuss each of these stages.

1. Develop an initial research question—what is called a working research question, given that it is a work in progress (Chapter 4: Research Questions);
2. Conduct a literature review to identify a gap in the existing body of research (what is called a research problem) and refine your research question (Chapter 5: Research Design);
3. Propose hypotheses based on your literature review (Chapter 5: Research Design);
4. Decide on an overall research strategy: whether your analytical approach will be inductive or deductive, what the target population is, etc. (Chapter 4: Research Questions);
5. Define key concepts and measures—what is called conceptualization and operationalization, respectively (Chapter 7: Measuring the Social World)
6. Decide on a method of data collection (Chapter 5: Research Design and the chapters devoted to each method);
7. Decide on your sampling strategy (Chapter 6: Sampling); and
8. Identify and address any ethical concerns about your proposed study (Chapter 8: Ethics).

Please note that the stages of research design we’ve just described do not necessarily have to follow this order. For instance, you may have a good idea of the sample of research participants you want to recruit for your study well before you know the specific questions you’ll ask of them. Also, you will continually move back and forth steps—for example, between reading previous studies on your topic and further revising your research question, and between refocusing your research question and rethinking the ways you measure your variables. Nevertheless, you will need to address all these stages of research design at some point.

In this chapter, we’ll start off by discussing ways of generating and refining a research question. We’ll also cover different types of research questions, which roughly correspond to different types of data collection and analysis. Please note that throughout the process of developing your research question, you want to be reviewing the existing studies on your topic, which is the best way to clarify and sharpen your question. This reading of previous research—what we call the academic literature—needs to happen throughout the research design process (and should continue even beyond it, to help make sense of your study’s findings). We discuss how to write a literature review in Chapter 5: Research Design, but even after you move on to that stage, we advise you to keep revising your research question, using the advice in this current chapter to connect your question more clearly and creatively to the existing body of scientific knowledge on your topic.